


a heap of broken images

by bendingwind



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-12
Updated: 2011-08-12
Packaged: 2017-11-06 00:17:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/412629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bendingwind/pseuds/bendingwind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, she’s afraid she might be going crazy. Based on a prompt by artemis_ephsus @ <a href="http://watch-them-run.livejournal.com/66280.html">watch-them-run</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	a heap of broken images

Sometimes, she’s afraid she might be going crazy. She sees every path, all of time and space, all of the futures that were and will be and could be and won’t ever be; all of the women she might have been, a deadly killer with an eye patch and stilettos, a twenty-first century archaeologist, a bored housewife from the sixties. In some ways, she is all of those women, because she hasn’t the control her Doctor has. He lives only what he chooses, sees only what he wants, remembers only what he will, and she does not.

Her actual, physical body, set on the curve of reality that this particular universe is dripping along, is a mad time-traveling professional badass (more generally known by the title ‘archaeologist’), and if asked, that is how she would describe herself. But as vividly as she remembers the first time she kissed the Doctor, she remembers slamming the door in the face of a neighbor who wouldn’t stop trying to share a recipe for cake, or the time she looked straight at the man she loved, lifted her gun, and shot him in the face. She remembers growing up with her parents, her beautiful, clever mother and her wonderful, brave, kind father; she also remembers living in an abandoned orphanage and on the streets of New York. She knows what homemade cooking tastes like every bit as well as she knows the taste of half-rotten apple, or blue nerf milk. She has loved half a million people besides her Doctor, in times and places where she did not even know he existed, and she has loved him half a million ways.

She answers to River and Melody and “hey, you!” and “stop there!” and “my bad girl” and, in a denied future that she tries her hardest not to dwell on, Korvarian.

Reality is so very fluid, and so very fragile, and no one knows it better than River Song, who is too many things and too many women and too many memories to name. Here and now, however, she is River Song, daughter of Amy and Rory Pond, a bit madly in love with the Doctor and, of all the possibilities she can see and choose and live, this is the one she loves best.

* * *


End file.
